Hospital appointment battle lands in court

Posted: Thursday, July 31, 2003

By Allison Floydafloyd@onlineathens.com

Over the years, local leaders used several different ways to pick people to serve on the Clarke County Hospital Authority. Sometimes authority members sent a pair of names to the county commission, sometimes they sent several nominees and since 1997 they've sent just one.

When the state legislature gave hospital authorities more power to pick their own members in 1964, the local authority, which controls Athens Regional Medical Center, declined. Members of the then-4-year-old hospital authority said they would continue to nominate members the way they always had.

They just didn't say what that way was.

THE CASE: Superior Court Judge Lawton Stephens is expected to rule sometime next month on the Clarke County Hospital Authority's request that the court bar the county commission from advertising for candidates to the hospital authority and force commissioners to pick two names from a list of four locals whom authority members nominated to fill vacancies on the board.

The debate over whether Athens-Clarke County commissioners can appoint anyone to the hospital authority - not just people from a short list of authority nominees - came to court Wednesday. Attorneys for the Hospital Authority of Clarke County and the Athens-Clarke County government presented 40-year-old documents and recorded testimony from four men who remember how the hospital authority operated in its earliest days.

Superior Court Judge Lawton Stephens is expected to rule sometime next month on the hospital authority's request that the court bar the county commission from advertising for candidates to the hospital authority and force commissioners to pick two names from a list of four locals whom authority members nominated to fill vacancies on the board.

Authority board members and county commissioners began to argue about the appointment process nearly a year ago, and the debate brought them to court earlier this month after commissioners voted to change the way they appoint new members of the nine-member authority board.

In an effort to get a more diverse slate of nominees, commissioners eschewed the long-held practice in which the authority nominated one citizen and the county commission appointed the person.

The authority - which maintains that a 1964 authority vote gives the board the right to nominate new members - promptly sued the county.

Stephens' decision may hinge on how appointments were made between 1960 and 1964, though the official record from those authority business meetings is missing.

Authority members had the chance to change their appointment process in 1964, but since they voted to keep it, the way appointments are made can't be changed by the authority board or the county commission, according to attorneys from both sides. Only the state legislature can do it.

Since the meeting minutes from the 1960s are lost, the authority relied on the memory of the only four survivors who were a part of the earliest appointment decisions. An attorney, a county commissioner and two authority members from those years all agreed that in the authority's first years, members nominated two people to the authority board and the county commission picked one to appoint.

But documents through the years - including the 1960 resolution that created the authority and 1982 legislation that allowed multiple terms on the board - said only that authority board members would be appointed by the county commission. The documents don't address nominations.

County commissioners want to ''politicize'' the appointment process, authority attorney Emmet J. Bondurant II said, and if they want unilateral appointment power, they must ask the legislature to make a change.

The commission already has sole appointing power, argued attorney Drew Marshall, who represented the county at the hearing. While county commissioners took recommendations from the authority board over the past four decades, those nominations weren't binding or, at times, even formal, he said.